Companies seeking to increase their profit margins continually strive to both drive down costs and increase the productivity of their workforce. It does not matter if a worker is an assembly line worker responsible for putting the finishing touches on a manufactured product or if they are a graphic designer; the more that any of these workers can do means more revenue to the company that employs them, and in turn, greater profits.
There are multitudes of ways to manage workers. Some involve nothing more than a manager whose entire job is to walk around and ensure that the line workers are actually doing something. Others involve enforcing quotas of production, and encouraging over-achievement. A survey of 100 companies will probably yield almost 100 distinct ways of managing workers. In their simplest forms, these distinct ways have some commonality in that they all track the completion of tasks.